Monday, 24 June 2013

Over the years the web crawling engine that's shared by Integrity and Scrutiny has become faster, more efficient, more accurate and free of problems. It does what it does really well.

But the interface hasn't kept up; it displays its results and then you're on your own. Support calls have been about what people want to do next:

"Where is this link that it's reporting?"

"I only want to copy that URL but there doesn't seem to be an easy way to do it"

I hope that the new version 4.2 will help with such tasks. Useful functions such as 'Copy URL', 'Visit', 'Highlight' and the exciting new 'Locate' function can be found via context menus, buttons, keyboard shortcuts and menus.

First of all, the 'by link' view is an expandable view, meaning that the list of pages that the link appears on can more intuitively be seen from that view without having to open the link inspector:

The link inspector is improved. You can still double-click in its table to either visit or highlight (according to your preferences) but you can now also pop up a context menu with a number of options, or use the new buttons to visit, highlight or locate:

The Locate function is a big help in those situations where you're not quite sure how the crawler has found a certain page - maybe it's an old page you thought you'd orphaned. Previously it was possible to trace the path but it was time-consuming. Now you can call up a list of the clicks required from your starting point to the link in question:

These useful functions are available from context menus - right-click or command-click the link or page to pop up a menu:

The new versions of Integrity and Scrutiny containing these features are available for download: